A Sophisticated Palate

Several years ago, I lived on the sixth floor of a walk-up in Manhattan’s East Village. I shared our cramped three bedroom apartment with at least two other people at any one time, and occasionally their assorted hangers-on, as well. At nine feet by seven feet, my bedroom was only slightly larger than your average office cubicle, and my roommates’ bedrooms were only slightly larger. As you can probably imagine it’s difficult for human beings to cohabit peaceably under such dehumanizing conditions. And there was certainly no shortage of drama.

One of my best friends, who occupied one of the other bedrooms for about three years, was a source of regular irritation due to his habit of waking up at three in the morning all parched and proceeding to slake his thirst with whatever items were in our refrigerator, regardless of their owner. And invariably, those items tended to be mine.

I’ll never forget the time that I came home from work to face a sheepish apology from my roommate for having eaten the rest of my jar of Raspberry Polaner All-Fruit:

“Dude, I’m so sorry, but I ate the rest of your jelly last night.”

“What do you mean you ate the rest of my jelly? There’s no bread in this apartment.”

“I know, I know. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was so thirsty that I drank your jelly straight out of the jar.”

“Wait a minute- I’m just not understanding. How can you possibly satisfy thirst with jelly?”

“Dude!” he exclaimed as he collected his thoughts. Then more quietly, “Dude, there was no water in the Brita, and I didn’t have any Gatorade left. I really needed something sweet and liquid, and your jelly was the closest thing to that in our fridge.”

“You are an insane person.”

A few weeks later, I brought home a bottle of Guyanese banana soda that a co-worker was kind enough to specially schlep in from her Guyanese enclave way out in Queens. I was saving it for the weekend, so it languished in our fridge for a couple of days. But then, one day after work, I noticed it’s level had dropped about an inch. Of course, my roommate was the culprit. But this time, I was actually upset, as this soda was not something that I could just score down the street, and I certainly was not keen on drinking a banana soda that had traces of my roommate’s backwash.

A couple of months later, however, I enjoyed sweet, though unintentional, revenge. I used to occasionally get take-out from the Mee Noodle Shop on First Ave., a noodle joint that was purportedly a favorite of Allen Ginsberg’s and is now sadly closed. I would always get a noodle soup with steamed vegetables, and would typically eat all the noodles and most of the vegetables, but then still have a ton of leftover broth. For some reason, I would stow this broth in our fridge, rather than disposing of it, as if I would ever have any reason to consume the rest of it. And more often than not, it would remain in our fridge for weeks on end until someone had the fortitude to bust it open, and pour its putrifying contents down the drain.

So one day, I came home from work and decided that it was time to clean out our fridge. The first thing I noticed was that the formerly full container of broth, which had easily been in our fridge for the past six weeks, had been nearly drained. Just a few stray bits of noodle and a mushroom cap, the dregs of a dinner from weeks past, were lurking in a pool of broth at the bottom of the container. Perplexed, I called my roommate into the kitchen.

As he walked in, I held up the nearly empty container of broth with a quizzical expression.

“Dude, I’m so sorry,” he said with a look of shame. “I woke up in the middle of the night again, and I was so thirsty. That broth saved me.”

“Are you kidding me?! You drank the broth?”

“Please, I’m sorry.”

Then I started laughing. “Do you realize you drank broth that’s at least six weeks old?”

His expression turned from shame to horror. “Oh God, no!” he cried with a pained expression. “No, no, no!” he whimpered.

When he finally regained his composure, I inquired, “Just explain to me how you could drink a half liter of broth and not realize that it had gone bad. I really want to know.”

“Well, I did think that it tasted sort of funny,” he explained.  “But then, you’re always being adventurous and trying new things all the time. I guess I just assumed that this was something that my palate was simply not sophisticated enough to appreciate.”

—AC